As a teenager/young adult, I was almost 100% “piracy”. As time went on it evolved more into “try before I buy” for games (with GOG being my platform of choice)

As a teenager/young adult, I was almost 100% “piracy”. As time went on it evolved more into “try before I buy” for games (with GOG being my platform of choice) where if I actually have more than 3 play sessions, then I actually enjoyed to game and wasn’t just caught up in addiction behavior. The many thousands of songs I had collected gradually rose to about 20% paid for via CD’s. These days even the majority of my music has now been bought, thanks to things like bandcamp and also having enough money that I don’t have to evaluate whether I can support an artist or need to support myself. I absolutely won’t do pure streaming, my archive is important, especially since I make modifications. I’m always going to do what I do, but I’m all for supporting people doing things I like if it’s not a sacrifice. Hell, there are probably a hundred or two YouTube creators I’d happily throw a dollar at per year if it was easy. And they’d make more money from that than if I sat down and watched thousands of their videos ads and all.